Release a rendering of a very tall, very shiny glass tower looming over an idyllic mountain village and the Internet goes bananas. That's what happened earlier this week when Morphosis Architects of Los Angeles released its design renderings for a new luxury hotel in Vals, a low-key spa town in the Swiss Alps.

It still crosses Wilshire Boulevard. But in other ways, architect Peter Zumthor's plan for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has undergone a significant makeover.
Once a free-flowing, biomorphic design inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits and the work of...

Jet lag can do strange things to a person. But it wasn't just a mixed-up body clock that had me awake at 3 a.m. during a trip to Japan a few years ago, madly scrolling through online ferry schedules and trying to plot a route by train, boat and taxi to...

Architect Elizabeth Diller, dressed mostly in sober New York black, hard hat in hand, stood on the Grand Avenue sidewalk Friday morning in front of the Broad museum, which she designed with her New York firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and is set to open...

At this awkward stage in its young life, the new Maggie Daley Park brings to mind a gangly teenager. Energetic? Absolutely. Graceful? Not yet.
It's strange to come upon this park, whose towering, tripod-shaped light masts resemble giant praying mantises...

Architect Peter Zumthor has dramatically revised his design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, creating a new bridge-like section of the building that would span Wilshire Boulevard.
The new design is meant to address concerns that the original plan would encroach on, and potentially damage, the La Brea Tar Pits at the neighboring Page Museum, casting a shadow over the largest pit.
Zumthor has said that the early models were always subject to revision. In any case, his updated design for the...

The world’s oldest piece of art is graffiti, Norway has new abstract money and it’s super-cool, an artist beats the IRS in court, and architect Moshe Safdie is totally over public-private space. Plus: architectural separated-at-birth, developments in public housing and Nazi rules about jazz. There’s a lot going on in today's Round-Up:
— Let’s kick things off with the hard news: Privacy concerns were cited when a Berlin arts space canceled a performance/installation by...

The spaceship, alas, has lived to see another day.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced changes on Monday to the design team working on a $300-million movie museum on Wilshire Boulevard.
Zoltan Pali, the Los Angeles architect who'd been collaborating with the acclaimed Italian Renzo Piano, has left the job. Another firm, soon to be named, will join the project as executive architect as it approaches the start of construction later this year.
The switch is a response to recent...

The challenge in visiting the Art Institute of Chicago is to get beyond the obvious. Easier said than done.
You could spend your time cruising from one iconic work to another, from "Nighthawks" to "American Gothic" to a Calder mobile overhead to Renoir's "Two Sisters (On the Terrace)" to Giacometti's Walking Man II sculpture to the Frank Lloyd Wright art glass — and on and on and on into the collection.
You would have a full day of visual and mental stimulation, an art history course delivered...

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam does it. The Louvre does it — twice. The Sackler Museum at Harvard wanted to do it in the 1980s, but neighbors objected and its design was changed.
Bridging a major street, as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art now proposes to do in expanding across Wilshire Boulevard, is not an unprecedented idea for a prominent museum. In truth the gesture by LACMA and its architect, Peter Zumthor, is the product not so much of boldness as a combination of diplomacy and fidelity...

If the new West Hollywood Library is among the finest public projects to hit Southern California in a decade, what else belongs on that list? Contenders include work by Frederick Fisher, Michael Maltzan and Daly Genik, among others.